IFTTT stands for “if this, then that” and it's a handy way to automate daily tasks on your smartphone in a fairly intuitive manner.

How does IFTTT work? It uses the concepts of ‘recipes’, which are user-specified triggers that will connect and activate the apps you have on your smartphone.

How you connect those apps is entirely up to you and you can be pretty creative when you link apps. For instance, if your weather app forecasts rain, link it to your email to send you email alerts.

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Android-optimised recipes

IFTTT app makes its way to Android users

There are six Android-centric channels already available for new IFTTT users, which are SMS, device, location, notification, phone call and photo. Right now there are far more iOS recipes than there are Android ones, but the great thing is you get some inspiration for your own recipes.

The good news is, there are some recipes that you can do on Android but aren’t possible on iOS. For instance, you can back up your texts or even record a log of your phone calls.

The download is fairly quick and you will need to create an IFTTT account to proceed. Be patient, though, as the app takes a fair amount of time to setup and might take longer on a slower, older phone.

Once you create an account, you can login to the IFTTT website and look through recipes or browse recipes from the app itself. Be warned, you could easily fritter away a lot of time looking through the many recipes users have concocted.

Before you get around to making your own recipe, you might want to look through the recipes, implement them and get creative at a later stage. One user even had his phone remind him to drink a cold beer if the temperature rose to a certain level. Great use of IFTTT indeed!